Hibernate Core 4.0.0.CR2 has just been released. The complete list of its changes can be found in the JIRA release notes.

HHH-6586 As Steve said in this post, we will continue new metamodel development after 4.0.0 release, we think the deprecation of Configuration may confuse the community, so in this issue, we removed the deprecation tag from this class, and we will continue to support this API until we get new metamodel ready, at which point this class will become deprecated and scheduled for removal in 5.0.

HHH-6622 Upgrade to Hibernate Commons Annotations 4.0.0.CR2, now, we have fully moved to jboss logging, no slf4j-api dependency required anymore.